A few days ago, I stumbled across an interesting TED Talk video by Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, founders of the parenting site Babble. The talk is about the “four taboos of parenting”. And while I didn’t find most of those taboos that interesting, the fourth one — that having kids might not actually make you happy — was pretty interesting. Griscom and Volkman talked about all the research showing that having kids doesn’t seem to make people any happier and that it reduces your martial happiness (see the chart above, from their talk).

Griscom and Volkman don’t really provide any real scientific evidence to rebut the claim that kids don’t make us any happier. But they do make a point that rang really true to me.

That point is that while children don’t make us happier, they do make our happiness a lot “spikier” — that, from minute to minute, we swing from moments of complete despair and frustration — like, say, during a tantrum — to moments of absolute, transcendent bliss, like when our kid says something adorably cute. And that having children is really a deal we make with ourselves to endure those really low moments in exchange for highs far beyond what we could have experienced without children.

Here’s the full TED Talk. The point on happiness comes around the 11-minute mark.

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